Papadopoulos, the"Professor" & Lady: All High on Drugs at Meetings

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21. From mid-June through mid-August 2016, PAPADOPOULOS pursued an "off

the record" meeting between one or more Carnpaign representatives and "members of president
Putin's office and the mfa."

a. For example,-on or about June 19, 2016, after several email and Skype

exchanges with the Russian MFA Connection, defendant PAPADOPOULOS emailed the HighRanking

Campaign Official, with the subject line "New message from Russia": "The Russian

ministry of foreign affairs messaged and said that if Mr. Trump is unable to make it to Russia, if

a campaign rep (me or someone else) can make it for meetings? I am willing to make the trip off

the record if it's in the interest of Mr. Trump and the campaign to meet specific people."

b. After several weeks of further communications regarding a potential "off

the record" meeting with Russian officials, on or about August 15, 2016, the Campaign

Supervisor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that "I would encourage you" and another foreign

policy advisor to the Campaign to "make the trip{], if it is feasible."


c. The trip proposed by defendant PAPADOPOULOS did not take place.


III. The Defendant's False Statements to the FBI

22. On or about January 27, 2017, defendant PAPADOPOULOS agreed to be

interviewed by agents from the FBI.

23. The agents informed defendant PAPADOPOULOS that the FBI was investigating

interference by the Russian government in the 2016 presidential election...

 

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In light of the 13 Russians...the mystery continues...

 

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As the Dossier Scandal Looms, the New York Times Struggles to Save Its Collusion Tale
By Andrew C. McCarthy

• January 1, 2018 10:28 PM

page-one headline the New York Times ran on April 20, 2017, above its breathless report that “a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign” was a June 2016 visit to Moscow by Carter Page.

It was due to the Moscow trip by Page, dubbed a “foreign policy adviser” to the campaign, that “the F.B.I. obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” in September — i.e., during the stretch run of the presidential campaign.

How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt.”

Seven months after throwing Carter Page as fuel on the collusion fire lit by then-FBI director James Comey’s stunning public disclosure that the Bureau was investigating possible Trump campaign “coordination” in Russia’s election meddling, the Gray Lady now says: Never mind. We’re onto Collusion 2.0, in which it is George Papadopoulos — then a 28-year-old whose idea of résumé enhancement was to feign participation in the Model U.N. — who triggered the FBI’s massive probe by . . . wait for it . . . a night of boozy blather in London.

What’s going on here?

Well, it turns out the Page angle and thus the collusion narrative itself is beset by an Obama-administration scandal: Slowly but surely, it has emerged that the Justice Department and FBI very likely targeted Page because of the Steele dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed disguised as intelligence reporting. Increasingly, it appears that the Bureau failed to verify Steele’s allegations before the DOJ used some of them to bolster an application for a spying warrant from the FISA court (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).

Thanks to the persistence of the House Intelligence Committee led by Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the dossier story won’t go away. Thus, Democrats and their media friends have been moving the goal posts in an effort to save their collusion narrative. First, we were led to believe the dossier was no big deal because the FBI would surely have corroborated any information before the DOJ fed it to a federal judge in a warrant application. Then, when the Clinton campaign’s role in commissioning the dossier came to light, we were told it was impertinent to ask about what the FBI did, if anything, to corroborate it since this could imperil intelligence methods and sources — and, besides, such questions were just a distraction from the all-important Mueller investigation (which the dossier had a hand in instigating and which, to date, has turned up no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy).

Lately, the story has morphed into this: Well, even if the dossier was used, it was only used a little — there simply must have been lots of other evidence that Trump was in cahoots with Putin. But that’s not going to fly: Putting aside the dearth of collusion evidence after well over a year of aggressive investigation, the dossier is partisan propaganda. If it was not adequately corroborated by the FBI, and if the Justice Department, without disclosing its provenance to the court, nevertheless relied on any part of it in a FISA application, that is a major problem.

So now, a new strategy to prop up the collusion tale: Never mind Page — lookee over here at Papadopoulos!

But that’s not what they were saying in April, when the collusion narrative and Democratic calls for a special prosecutor were in full bloom.

Back then, no fewer than six of the Times’ top reporters, along with a researcher, worked their anonymous “current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials” in order to generate the Page blockbuster. With these leaks, the paper confidently reported: “From the Russia trip of the once-obscure Mr. Page grew a wide-ranging investigation, now accompanied by two congressional inquiries, that has cast a shadow over the early months of the Trump administration” [emphasis added].

Oh sure, the Times acknowledged that there might have been a couple of other factors involved. “Paul Manafort, then [i.e., during Page’s trip] Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, was already under criminal investigation in connection with payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.” And “WikiLeaks and two websites later identified as Russian intelligence fronts had begun releasing emails obtained when Democratic Party servers were hacked.”

But the trigger for the investigation — the “catalyst” — was Page.

Somehow, despite all that journalistic leg-work and all those insider sources, the name George Papadopoulos does not appear in the Times’ story.

as I outlined in a column last weekend, a significant part of what got the FBI and the Obama Justice Department stirred up about Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow was the Steele dossier — the anti-Trump reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. Alas, six months after the Times’ planted its feet on Page as the linchpin of the Trump-Russia investigation, we learned that the dossier was actually an opposition-research project paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. We further learned that at Fusion GPS, the research firm that retained Steele for the project, Steele collaborated on it with Nellie Ohr, the wife of top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr — and that Bruce Ohr had personally been briefed on the project by Steele and a Fusion GPS executive.

It is an explosive problem, this use of the dossier by the Obama Justice Department and the FBI in an application to the FISA court for authority to spy on Trump’s associates. Politically, it suggests that the collusion narrative peddled by Democrats and the media since Trump’s victory in the November election was substantially driven by partisan propaganda. Legally, it raises the distinct possibilities that (a) the FBI did not adequately verify the claims in the dossier before using them in an application to the secret federal court; and (b) the Justice Department of the then-incumbent Democratic administration did not disclose to the court that the dossier was produced by the Democratic presidential campaign for use against the rival Republican candidate.

When it emerged in October that the dossier was a Democratic-party campaign product, Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) recounted that, for months, the Justice Department and FBI had stonewalled House demands that they fess up about whether dossier allegations were used in applying for the FISA-court warrant to surveil Page. But though the DOJ and the Bureau have struggled to lock the barn, the horse left long ago. Shortly before the Times ran its Page extravaganza last April, CNN confirmed that the dossier had indeed been used to obtain the FISA warrant — the network relying on unnamed “US officials briefed on the [Russia] investigation.”

I won’t hazard a guess on which of CNN’s anonymous sources are also the Times’ anonymous sources. But it is safe to say the intelligence community, still suffused with Obama holdovers, has been undone by its own illegal leaking. Back in April, they leaked because they figured it would wound President Trump: After all, if the dossier had been used to obtain a FISA warrant, that must mean that the dossier’s sensational allegations of a traitorous Trump-Russia conspiracy were true. That is, the leakers assumed, just as many of us familiar with the FISA process assumed, that the Justice Department would never put information in a FISA warrant application unless the FBI had first corroborated it...

...It has become increasingly clear that Steele’s claims about Page are, at best, highly dubious; more likely, they are untrue. Aside from the fact that Comey has been dismissive of the dossier as “unverified,” Page has vigorously and plausibly denied its allegations about him. The Annapolis grad and former naval-intelligence officer insists he is not even acquainted with the Russian officials with whom he supposedly had traitorous meetings. Moreover, if the Russian regime truly wanted to make insidious proposals to Trump, it had emissaries far better positioned to approach him; it strains credulity to believe the Kremlin would turn to Page — barely known to Trump and, years earlier, derided as an “idiot” by a Russian intelligence operative who tried to recruit him.

Papadopoulos and the New ‘Russian Reset’

So now, with the Page foundation of the collusion narrative collapsing, and with the heat on over the Obama administration’s use of the dossier, it is apparently Papadopoulos to the rescue.

In the Times’ new version of events, it was not the dossier that “so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election.” That, according to the Times, is a false claim that “Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged.” Somehow, the paper omits the inconvenient details that it was the Times that led the charge in claiming that it was Page’s trip to Moscow that provoked the investigation, and that it was the dossier that so alarmed the FBI about that trip.

In what we might think of as the latest “Russian Reset,” the Times now says the investigation was instigated by “firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies” — Australia. Turns out Papadopoulos was out drinking in London with Alexander Downer, “Australia’s top diplomat in Britain.” Tongue loosened, the “young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign” made a “startling revelation” to Downer: He had learned that “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.”

Because of the “Statement of the Offense” that Special Counsel Mueller filed with the court when Papadopoulos pled guilty, the Times and the rest of us now know that a few weeks earlier (on April 26), Papadopoulos was told by a Maltese academic who purported to have Kremlin ties that Russia had “thousands of emails” that could damage Hillary Clinton. We also know that in July, hacked Democratic-party emails began being published.

With that established, we’re now told that when the emails were leaked, Australian officials put two and two together, figuring these emails might be what Papadopoulos was talking about “that night at the Kensington Wine Room.” The Aussies thus tipped off their American counterparts to the barroom conversation between Papadopoulos and Downer. That, not the dossier explicitly alleging a Trump-Russia conspiracy, is what provoked the investigation. You can take it to the bank. After all, the Times has gotten this revisionist history from “four American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role” — i.e., from the same sort of unidentified, unaccountable sources that brought you the Page-centric version of events that has now been discarded.

As I pointed out after Papadopoulos pled guilty, he was told that the Russians had “emails of Clinton.” But the hacked emails that were published were not Clinton’s emails; they were those of the DNC and John Podesta — exceedingly few of which Clinton was even included on, much less participated in. Given the amount of misinformation the credulous Papadopoulos was given (one of his interlocutors falsely posed as Putin’s niece), the likelihood is that he was being toyed with: Remember, there was much speculation at the time, including by Trump himself, that the Russians (and other foreign intelligence services) might have hacked former secretary Clinton’s unsecure private server and obtained the 30,000-plus emails that she refused to surrender to the State Department; it is probable that these were the emails Papadopoulos’s dubious Russian connections purported to be dangling.

There is no evidence that Papadopoulos or the Trump campaign was ever shown or given any of the emails the Kremlin purportedly had. The evidence, in fact, undermines the collusion narrative: If the Trump campaign had to learn, through Papadopoulos, that Russia supposedly had thousands of emails damaging to Clinton, that would necessarily mean the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia’s acquisition of the emails. This, no doubt, is why Mueller permitted Papadopoulos to plead guilty to a mere process crime — lying in an FBI interview. If there were evidence of an actual collusion conspiracy, Papadopoulos would have been pressured to admit guilt to it. He wasn’t.

 

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New York Post

Author of Trump dossier said feds had a mole in Trump campaign
By Mark Moore

January 9, 2018 | 2:56pm | Updated January 9, 2018 | 3:27pm


The former British intelligence agent who compiled the controversial dossier on Donald Trump said the FBI told him the agency had a “source” inside Trump’s presidential campaign, according to a transcript of a Senate interview released Tuesday.

Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson said when Christopher Steele contacted FBI agents about information he had that the Russians were trying to interfere in the 2016 election, they told him they had somebody inside the organization providing them information.

“Essentially what he told me was they had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source and that — that they — my understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris’ information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization,” Simpson told the Senate Judiciary Committee during an August 2017 hearing.

Simpson testified behind closed doors at the hearing and has called for the transcript to be released after GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, the panel’s chair, refused to do so.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) made the transcript public on Tuesday.

Fusion was hired in April 2016 by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee to provide opposition research on Trump.

 

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[TroglocratsRdumb]

The Democratic Party's incredible corruption and abuses of power are a threat to our democracy.

 

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George Papadopoulos’s Loose Lips Sink Ships
by Martin Longman
April 2, 2018


1. STRANGER DANGER
9 hours ago
Report: Trump Aide Papadopoulos Said Sessions ‘Encouraged’ Contact With Clinton ‘Dirt’ Professor

Jason Wilson/ThinkProgress

Maybe stay home next time, George Papadopoulos? The former Trump campaign aide is reported to have told a stranger at a Chicago nightclub that now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions “encouraged” him in 2016 to “find out anything he could about the hacked Hillary Clinton emails,” according to a report from ThinkProgress. Jason Wilson, a computer programmer, told the outlet that he saw Papadopoulos and his social-media-friendly wife, Simona Mangiante, at Chicago’s Hydrate Thursday night, where they were drinking vodka. Wilson said he proceeded to make small talk about the Trump Russia investigation—and then Papadopoulos reportedly told him that things were “just getting started.”

 

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WAS MISFUD A BRITISH SPY? Claire Smith is not the only British official associated with Mifsud. He was a speaker at an event by the Central European Initiative alongside former British diplomat Charles Crawford...IS PAPODOPOULOS A DEMOCRAT PLANT? IS THE BLONDE ANOTHER PROSTITUTE?

 

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Papadopoulos To Tell Congress About Series Of Suspicious …
- George Papadopoulos has informed Congress that he hopes to discuss his suspicious interactions with 9 people during the 2016 presidential campaign.